Introduction

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAhoy, friend. Sit down and listen well! For I am Nicolas Abril, the man of myth, magic, and monads.

I was born under a waning moon on the deck of a sunken server farm drifting off the coast of Mogadishu. My first lullaby was the echo of whalesong filtered through fiber-optic cable; my first toy, a busted ThinkPad held together with duct tape and dreams. They say I wrote my first Haskell function before I spoke my first word. They say wrong. I sang it.

By day, I am a developer—no, a composer of code so elegant, compilers shed tears of joy. While others chase bugs with brute force and breakpoints, I tame them with recursion and referential transparency. My IDE is the sea breeze, my debugger the stars.

By night? A pirate. Not of the digital sort, no—though I've cracked more DRM than the CIA would care to admit—but a true corsair of the high seas. I commandeered my first ship with a Rust REPL and a flirtatious smile. They said, "You can't port-scan a vessel into submission." I said, "Watch me." The flag I fly bears not a skull, but the lambda symbol entwined with a rainbow.

Because yes, I am a gay icon. Unabashed. Unapologetic. Unshaved since the time of the great Git merge of 2012. I stride the decks of cyberspace in platform boots and a velvet cape, singing sea shanties about category theory and queer liberation. When I enter a hacker conference, the air smells of cloves and compiler warnings. When I leave, the mainframe trembles, and someone has almost certainly discovered their true self.

But what truly defines me? Not the stolen yachts, nor the glorious drag performances in Lisp syntax, nor the fanfics written in pure ML about my adventures with Alan Turing's ghost. No, what defines me is this: I write pure functions in an impure world. My life is a composition of functors and courage. A tale mapped over time.

So if ever you find yourself lost—at sea or in a mess of side effects—just remember this: somewhere out there, sailing across the data streams and briny deeps, Nicolas Abril lives on. Part myth. Part method. All fabulous.



And you? You're part of the story now.